Look, let’s take all the dick-swinging out of this argument (from both parties) and look at it rationally.
At one point in time, not that long ago, New York looked like the shiny city of the future.
I bet the Yankees would look at cities in Europe that were previously held up as being at the leading edge of the modern metropolis (London, Paris, Vienna, etc.) and laugh at their five-storey buildings built on narrow meandering throughfares.
New York was a city built to a rational and logical grid design. It was increasingly built with steel.
When Robert Moses got his way and demolished entire communities to build some roads out to the newly built suburbs, New York’s status as being at the forefront was probably well and truly cemented.
Except, by the 1970s though, I’m pretty sure that the people of Los Angeles were looking at New York and thinking that it was just a bit of a dreary piece of the past as their gleaming city in the desert showed the future.
Maybe Tokyo, for a short period, would even outshine LA.
That’s just what happens. Cities, particularly ones not tied emotionally to some historic golden era, get built in the modern standard with all their amazing infrastructure and we’re all amazed at this modern marvel that is progress.
And fair play to the Chinese for building these genuinely impressive cities. They are cities built for the 21st century and I’m certainly pretty jealous of a lot of what they’ve built. I’d love to have their levels of public transport infrastructure in Ireland and the UK.
But there will almost certainly come a day when some new upstart will build something that will make Shanghai look like a relic of a bygone era.
And the people of Shanghai will get defensive and remind everyone that so much of what they built in that gilded age is still standing and functioning and looking very well.
It’s happened countless times before. I see no reason why it should stop now.
Because the Chinese have developed rapidly only in recent years.
Here are two photographs, one of Shanghai in 1990, one in 2010:
New York’s growth was similarly phenomenal — but it happened 100 years earlier:
There is still constant construction in New York City. It has plenty of modern buildings:
But you don’t tear down the Empire State Building to build something new — it wouldn’t make sense to do so, since it’s perfectly good as it is. New buildings are usually larger buildings that replace smaller ones, so there are older buildings as well.
